Technical Committee

[RPG]

I will draft an announcement and try to send it later this afternoon
to this (CL-ISO) mailing list. Thinking Machines seems to be rejecting
mail, so we should not move until Steele can read his mail.

On the issue of the Lucid manual:

It is of this form: Its chapters are in a similar order to Steele's.
The material in each chapter is broken into 2 parts, a general discussion
and the specific constructs. Each construct starts on a separate page;
each construct is discussed as to purpose, syntax, remarks, examples, and
cross references. The purpose says what the construct does, the syntax
is obviously described, the remarks concern the actions of optional
and keyword arguments, etc, the examples are obviously presented, and
the cross references are to related constructs.

In form it is similar, but more complete and verbose, than the EuLisp
specification. It is not in discursive form, but fairly precise and terse.
I think it needs some amount of work to be made precise enough for a
specification.

The book is copyrightable by Lucid, though it is only implicitly copyrighted
now. We have been careful to steer clear of copyright problems with Digital
Press by having a wide range of people read it and the Steele book for
incidental similarity of prose. Our copyright lawyers have been active in
this perusal. From my point of view I don't see anything wrong with 
using this document as a starting point, but with some caveats.

We intend to distribute this book somehow, as a user's manual. It will
be copyrighted for that purpose. If there is some way to put the book in
the public domain as a jumping off point without harming the copyright on
the version we distribute, I don't see a problem with it. I suppose that if
the CL committee alters the document enough, then that could be placed in the
public domain. I will check with the lawyers.

We intend to put our own manual online for Lucid customers. Public domainess
would allow this as well for a descendent work. Keep in mind that this book
describes Lucid Common Lisp specifically.

In summary, I want to protect Lucid so it can use the work as we have intended,
but if there is a way to let the CL committee start off with the text in the
public domain, I think things could be worked out.

For whatever document we use, I think that Lucid is willing to contribute
a recording secretary. We have an interest in keeping our own doumentation
up to date, and we have a largish writing staff. I am not sure, however, that
a private company is the proper place for such a secretary.

			-rpg-